One of three heirs won't sign until the house is cleaned out

Option 3 with post-close access is the one that has bitten me. I did a version of it, two week access for a daughter, and it turned into six weeks because she kept finding reasons. My demo crew sat. My holding cost on a hard money draw for four extra weeks was more than the 8 points you'd be giving up.

If you go with 3, the access has to be a specific date with a specific consequence, and the consequence has to be something other than a lawsuit because nobody is suing over a bedroom set. I've had better luck putting 3 to 5 in escrow released to the heir when they hand back the key, dated. Money coming to them beats money coming from them.

Also your renovation range is 58 to 66 on a soft deck question. Get up there before you commit to 152. That's a 8 point swing on its own and you're stacking it against an 8 point negotiation.

On the clean-out cost, 4 to 6 for a 1,400 foot house with 30 years in it is optimistic unless you already have a crew that owes you a favor. I've seen bids come in at 9 for a house that size when the garage and attic were full and there was a basement. Ask whether they're charging by the truckload or by the day, the two numbers diverge fast, and ask who's paying dump fees.

Doesn't change your decision, but it changes option 1 from a 4 to 6 to maybe a 10, and at that point option 1 is worse than the price drop.

Naive question but why is the PR letting the local sibling drive this at all? If the letters give her authority to sell then the objection is family friction, not a title problem. What's she afraid of?

@pike she's afraid of Thanksgiving. That's the real answer. PRs almost never use their authority against a sibling because the property is worth less to them than the relationship, and the fee they'd get for administering is not enough to be the person who sold mom's house out from under their sister.

@compass I'd stop treating this as a three-option decision and go back to the sequencing. Right now you have a contract with a signature you can't rely on. I'd rather have a 45 day close with all three siblings acknowledging in writing that they're aware of the sale and don't object, even if that acknowledgment has no legal weight, than a 21 day close with a hidden veto. The signature that matters is the one that makes her stop, and it isn't yours.

Also, and this is where I'd disagree with @harrow: sometimes there really are coins. I paid for a two day sort on a hoarder estate, made the son do it with a shredder and a box, and he found about 6,000 in savings bonds. He signed the same day. Cost me 2,800. Cheapest concession I ever made because it turned me from the vulture into the guy who found the bonds.

It worked because I made it his sort, not mine. I paid, he decided what was trash.

Something in your numbers I want to poke at. You said 152 leaves you thin but workable on a wholetail and clean on an assignment. Those are different deals with different buyers and you've got one price serving both. What does the assignment buyer actually pay at 152 on a house needing 60 plus, with comps at 245 to 260? If your fee is 8 to 10 they're all in around 222 before carry and closing. That's not a deal most of the flippers I talk to take, so I think your assignment exit is thinner than you're describing and the 8 point drop in option 3 doesn't just eat most of the spread, it takes the exit off the table.

Which means you're a wholetail buyer pretending to have two exits. If that's right, the contents question matters less than the roof, because the wholetail math is where you live or die.

Roof deck first, everything else second. On a 1,400 foot ranch I can tell you from the attic in twenty minutes whether the sheathing is going, and the difference between reroof over one layer and a full tearoff with deck replacement on a house that age is real money, plus it changes your timeline because deck work means you're not putting a dumpster in the driveway on day one, you're waiting on a roofer.

Get in the attic before you negotiate again. You have three price conversations queued up and you're holding a range instead of a number, which means whoever you're talking to gets to pick which end of the range they believe.

On the sibling, I'd take option 3 but structure the access the way @keystone said, with the money going toward her rather than a penalty coming from her. And I'd write the demo start date into my own schedule as if the access ends on time, because if you plan around it slipping it will slip.